Jealott’s Hill campus is one of Syngenta’s largest research and development sites, with 100 buildings serviced by a local IT intrastructure.

Syngenta is one of the world’s largest agribusiness companies and a global operation with major production and research operations in over 20 countries. Syngenta invests heavily in Research and Development, collaborating with hundreds of universities, research institutes and companies worldwide. It is justifiably proud of its significant contribution to increasing the production of food from the world’s finite reserves of agricultural land.

Branch, in conjunction with HP, undertook the campus wide refit using singlemode blown fibre technology from Brand-Rex to provide maximum bandwidth and resilience for the sizeable base of power users across the campus.

The first task was to conduct a detailed survey of each and every cable route, pathway, riser and manhole using endoscope technology to ensure there were no unexpected hazards.

Due to the sheer scale of the site GPS coordinates for each manhole, cabinet location and duct access point were established and used to create a scale 3D model in addition to traditional CAD plans. This model and the GPS co-ordinates proved a huge asset to the team as key decisions could be taken remotely and very precisely without repeated visits to this very secure site.

Having completed the sizeable surveying and modeling operations, a 30km optical duct network was laid around the campus to accommodate the dual routes to primary and secondary communication rooms. The individual ducts consisting of 2, 4 or 7 PTFE lined tubes were calculated to provide at least 50% capacity for network expansion without the capital investment demanded by large quantities of dark fibre. Every individual tube was tested for integrity and finally pressure tested before being certified as sound and capped to prevent the ingress of water or other pollutants.

The Access Rack from Cooper B Line was selected by Branch as it best was suited to this mission critical application, and more than 100 racks were installed across the campus in preparation for the mammoth task of blowing in the 250km of singlemode fibre required for the primary and secondary links to each location.

Once the singlemode fibre had been blown in, thousands of pigtails were fusion spliced for maximum longevity and the entire network tested to the client's specification at both 1310 and 1550nm in both directions before a final confirmation OTDR test.

Local communications were provided through some 6000 CAT5E outlets across the site with 50um blown fibre installed where necessary for building backbones. The business needs of the client dictated some buildings would remain occupied for the duration of works and Branch carefully constructed temporary 100BaseT Ethernet networks to support the user base while the huge volume of existing CAT3 cabling was removed and replaced with CAT5E. The careful planning of this part of the project ensured there was very little disruption to users and ensured adequate time was available to ensure the final switchover was painless.

The entire campus is covered by a 25 year warranty issued by the system manufacturer Brand-Rex.

This underlines both the manufacturer’s and Branch’s commitment to quality and guaranteeing transmission of all recognised Class D protocols over the infrastructure for a period of 25 years.

Branch also prepared an extremely detailed CAD system, based as installed routes, pathways and optic ducts; along with comprehensive test results in both hard and soft copy formats. System maintenance and subsequent moves, adds or changes are handled directly by Branch to ensure absolute quality and the essential continuous updating of the clients patching schedule.

Technical Overview

Backbone

• Brand-Rex singlemode blown fibre backbone
• Provision of Cooper B-Line Access Racks throughout the site
• Dual direction OTDR testing
• Full 25 year optical warranty issued

Structured Cabling

• 9/125 singlemode blown fibre external links
• 50/125 multimode blown fibre internal links
• Provision of Cooper B-Line Access Racks throughout the site
• Brand-Rex CAT5E UTP cable
• Brand-Rex CAT5E 24 port panels
• Full Class D warranty testing
• Full 25 year Class D warranty issued

Disaster Recovery

• Secondary comms room constructed
• Redundant singlemode blown fibre links installed campus wide